Day For Night

Jean Mcneil

Description

'From the author of Ice Diaries, winner of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival Grand Prize, praised by the New York Times as stunningly written and a Guardian Best Book of 2018.An unflinching exploration of love and boundaries in Brexit-crazed London.Richard Cottar is a respected independent film writer and director; his wife, Joanna, is his increasingly successful and wealthy producer. Together they are about to embark on a film about the life of Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who killed himself in northern Spain while on the run from the Nazis in 1940. In what looks set to be the last year of Britain's membership of the European Union, Benjamin's story of exile and statelessness is more relevant than ever. But Richard and Joanna's symbiotic life takes a sudden turn when they cast an intelligent, sexually ambiguous young actor in the role of Walter Benjamin. In a climate of fear and a bizarre, superheated ye

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 24 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773057057
• Langue: English

Extrait

Day for Night A Novel
Jean McNeil






Contents Dedication Epigraph Take One Part I: Night I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI Part II: Day I II III IV V VI VII VIII Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright


Dedication
For the citizens of Europe


Epigraph
“It appeared to us a land without memories, regrets, and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow.”
— Joseph Conrad, Karain
“I write all day and sometimes well into the night.”
— Walter Benjamin, Poveromo, Italy, 1932


Take One
Each time I set out to make a film I am starting all over again. I remember the films I have made as dreams, fugue states, too intense and painful to bear. But once they are over, all I can think about is: how do I get back there, wherever there is.
Any film begins to assemble itself long in advance, on the outskirts of intuition. Being a director at this stage is like being a woman who is only beginning to think of becoming pregnant. It begins as a nudge, an idea of itself first, a galactic child nagging you to yank it out of oblivion.
Four years ago I went to Portbou for the first time and remembered who had died there and what it meant. In that strange place — narrow streets truncated by mountains or by the sea, the devouring, lurid perspective of the place — a new child was born.
I wondered why his life had never been filmed. Biopics are sure winners at the box office and many garner Oscar nominations each year. They are either character-driven and nuanced or high-stakes drama focusing on bringing little-known details to life. I do and don’t understand why people want to see fictional renditions of actual — often, let’s face it, dead — people whose lives, viewed in retrospectroscope, have a verifiable shape, rather than fictional characters who live as we do, without a clue what is going to happen from one moment to the next. There is a rigid symmetry to the real, at least after it is over. The pieces can be slotted into place, the strategy of fate reveals itself as a chess game played by deities.
But then sometimes you come across a recently extant human being whose spirit feels like a vital presence in the world, still, who is not walking alongside us in another dimension separated only by plexiglass. They are as real as the apple in your hand or the 26 bus weaving down Cambridge Heath Road. They tug at your shirtsleeve and rattle around in your hot water bottle disguised as air bubbles. I’m alive , they cajole, these recent, unconvincing ghosts. Get me out of here .
When I first float the idea, Joanna says, “That film’s been done, dead intellectuals, Nazis shouting ‘Raus!’ We’re living through an eruption of neo-fascism now. Shouldn’t you write a story of our times instead of treading over well-worn ground?”
“Well-worn ground is the best kind of ground. How many films can you name about high school?”
“What kind of budget are we talking?” she snaps.
“I don’t know. Three million. Pounds,” I add, for good measure.
“Too —” Joanna’s hand flatlines just beneath her nose, her habitual gesture of the task of balancing artistic inspiration with the likelihood of financing — “low. And anyway, who would watch a film about a hapless Jewish intellectual everyone pretends to understand when actually no one has the faintest what he was writing about?”
I would , I think. And it’s too late, in any event. He — Walter Benjamin — is already here with me, his faded serge overcoat, its cuffs rubbed so clean they look like coils, his copper eyes luring me into the dimension of the unresurrected.
When a film begins to press itself upon me, I enter a Red Riding Hood stage. I am a child in a dark wood, or a burning house, or some other archetypal situation. I have to find my way out of the forest/house on fire and the only way to do it is to write a script, then make the words I have put on paper real. Nothing is ever finished in the realm of film, which is to say there is no death. We hum with alertness, we are on the way down, an Orphic descent into a realm of truth where ghosts and other spectators — even you — are watching, forever.


Part I: Night


I
Early January. The pavements are coated with pine needles that have been ground into paste. Carcasses of Christmas trees wait to be carted away to the post-festive charnel house. Some houses still have fairy lights and I find I am grateful to see them, rather than annoyed as I was two months ago, when they went up in early November. The monster of winter is in residence, of course, along with the epic remorse that follows Christmas.
The city levers itself into wintry, estuarine mist. In the half light of midday, bundles of unidentifiable creatures that might just be people propel themselves laboriously forward, curiously elevated, as if they are levitating off the ground, into the fog. The trees wave calligraphically to the sky. At the southernmost finger of London Fields a child wearing a Santa hat roars by me on a plastic car in the shape of a dragon. The man who runs the black pudding and cappuccino stall at the market sits slumped against his counter, reading the Daily Mail . “Remainers exposed” is the headline. Underneath it is a police line-up photomontage of the doughty faces of MPs who are not sufficiently zealous about torpedoing the country, we can only surmise.
So we live in Hackney. Why, you might ask? My film school brethren live in Notting Hill, in Battersea. Shorthand explanation: they made more money. Real explanation: they were less besotted with the idea of being an auteur. We moved here twenty-five years ago when we finished film school and made delicate, shifty “European” films, and never left.
Construction cranes rake the skies, where winking planes stitch patterns across the indigo darkness. I walk through arches, underneath bridges, those dank aortae between the neighbourhoods near our house: de Beauvoir Town, Haggerston, London Fields. We live on the fringes of the latter, between two flat, uncharismatic parks.
Mabati the dachshund (meaning of his name in Kiswahili: corrugated galvanized iron) accompanies me through this Siberian miner disaster film, clattering along on his stubs of legs. I recognize the trees and the streets and the grey parkaed bundles for what they are, but alongside reality is the version I would film, running like a parallel river. This film is about a film director, previously hailed as a visionary, who stands just over the threshold of middle age. The suet hue of the winter sky is the same colour as his heart and he has no idea why, he has done everything right, he has a convincing bio on IMDb, he has made Voyagers (2001), The Grass Is Singing (2004), Ryder (2009), Everyone Is Watching (2011) and Torch Song (2014). Watch him lurch across London Fields Park in the day-long twilight, bent against the storm of his future.
Yet this is not me, this imposter protagonist. I am not depressed, I see no reason to change or complicate my life. I love our house, a narrow Georgian leakage monster pumping wasted heat through sash windows and unpatrolled cracks in the wooden flooring, fireplace and panelled shutters, stopped only briefly by knock-off Persian rugs bought at the Turkish furniture emporia on Kingsland Road. Our two children, Nathan and Lucy, are well adjusted and happy in their state school, where they walk through knife detectors and on their way home fend off MDMA pimps who try to recruit them into moped gangs.
We have enough money. Joanna and her business partner Neil are the real breadwinners; they now work exclusively for Netflix and Sky, pumping out British content, mostly pearls-and-tiaras nostalgia fare for North Americans transfixed by codified social hierarchies. The money Joanna makes is largely kept from me and goes straight to her broker, where it is invested in renewable energy in South Africa and carbon-capture technology in New Zealand.
Time is ticking. I can hear it inside me. It is less clock than bomb. If I don’t make another film I will lose the thread of myself. Ambition is only the terror of irrelevance.
My subject has taken an interest in me. He walks beside me in these submarine hours when Mabati and I orbit the park, trying to read the hieroglyphs the trees have inscribed on the sky. This is when I know I’m on to something, as a writer: my characters don’t take over — that’s a silly fanciful notion — but they do start to haunt me, becoming friendly ghosts, chaperones, doppelgängers.
“Don’t negate this time, however difficult it is to live through,” he says to me, loud enough to cause Mabati’s left ear to wobble. “Yes, it’s cold, it’s January, your country has foresworn itself, it’s like a living death. But never wish time away. You don’t know how much of it there is left.”
“You should know,” I say. “I’ve already been alive a year longer than you were when you died.”
“Two,” he corrects me.
He doesn’t really speak like this. Would you be so kind, gentle lady, as to show me the path to my salvation? That was how he spoke, all his contemporaries commented on the decorous, Old-World syntax that even in 1940 was considered hilariously baroque. He says this to me in English, although in life his English was shaky and rudimentary, according to Hannah Arendt.
Mabati and I head back to the mothership, 11 Navarino Road. Our wedge of Hackney is